Wunderkind Moves From Gutter Politics to Life in the Gutter : Homelessness: John F. King once took pride in his mean streak. Now, fresh with the humility of the street, he regrets his ‘Marquis de Sade’ persona.
He was one of those tough boys who always seemed to overcome the obstacles thrown in his path.
He served in Vietnam and was awarded three Bronze Stars. He put himself through college and graduate school. He dove headfirst into the rough-and-tumble world of politics in the hills of West Virginia, ascending to leadership of the state Republican Party on the strength of his slash-and-burn tactics. At the height of his success, he fancied himself as the Lee Atwater of the Mountain State.
So, like many before him, John F. King decided it was time to graduate from the farm team and move up to the big leagues: Washington.
But something went terribly wrong. Contracts for his political consulting business dried up. Checks began bouncing. Clients stopped returning phone calls. And in the space of a few months, King had lost his business, his girlfriend, his apartment and his way of life.
Suddenly, incomprehensibly, the political Wunderkind from West Virginia found himself wandering around the nighttime streets of Old Town Alexandria, looking for a park bench to sleep on. He found himself staying in shelters for the homeless with men who described the best way to take a straight razor to someone’s throat. He found himself stuffing envelopes, pumping gas and answering telephones in a vain search for a permanent job.
“I guess I wanted to prove I could make it here,” he said, adding softly, “I guess I didn’t.”
As King tells his story, no one factor emerges as the reason for his decline. The economy, of course, was bad, but as King now views it, his rise-and-fall story is more about his personal arrogance and failure, of unexpectably hitting bottom but not being able to ask for help.
His case contradicts the stereotypical image of the homeless: He is not mentally deranged, nor a product of poverty. Friends say he has no drinking or drug problem. He is a college-educated man from a middle-class upbringing who discovered his own limitations at the same time he learned that homelessness is not merely an affliction of the ghettos.
“I found out it didn’t take much to waylay someone,” King said.
A native of the small town of Iaeger, W. Va., King, 40, said he came to Washington in 1988 and set up a one-man firm called Palladin Consulting, using post office boxes, fancy letterheads and a little “smoke and mirrors” to build an impressive front. “I had a great illusion going,” he said. “There were people out there who thought I was one hellaciously large company.”
But according to King and his professional associates, his intense personality and undiplomatic style burned bridges among fellow Republicans and turned away potential business.
“He would rub some people the wrong way on occasion,” said Fred F. Holt, a Charleston, W. Va., physician who enlisted King to run his unsuccessful 1984 bid for the state Senate. “He will sometimes just say things very bluntly without thinking about them.”
It all unraveled in about eight months. Early last year, King said, he began finding it tougher to get work; some contracts were not renewed and others that were regular sources of work had cut out funding for his services.
As his bank account drained dry, King knew his situation was becoming more precarious. He finally began distributing resumes in August, but he refused the only nibbles he received, saying the proposed salaries were far too low.
King said that in the fall, as he scrambled to win a North Carolina contract he needed to keep afloat, he sent a $2,000 check to a printer as a deposit for some work--with an understanding, he thought, that it would not be cashed until the contract came through. When the contract didn’t pan out and the check was cashed anyway, other checks he had written began bouncing.
Finally, in October, he was evicted from his $725-a-month apartment at the Boulevard of Old Town in Alexandria.
On the first night, he said, he instinctively returned to the apartment. “I ended up standing at the Boulevard and remembering I couldn’t go in,” he recalled. “So I walked down to Gibbon (Street), went to the park, sat down and I was exhausted. So I just lay down and went to sleep.”
From the moment he walked into the Carpenter’s Shelter in north Old Town the next day, he stood out.
Among all the sneakers, the ragged, hand-me-down clothing and the hard, worn-down faces, King wore his gray three-piece suit with the tie loosened, looking like a corporate benefactor who had lost his way. They called him “The Professor” because he spent so much time reading and quoting everyone from William Faulkner to Theodore Roosevelt.
“The first night I went to Carpenter’s Shelter, I walked in the door. They said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I was someone once.’ I was. I had lunch at the White House once. I used to walk into senators’ offices and congressmen’s offices,” King said.
Tenacious and highly competitive (“I used to get in a froth over a game of dominoes”), King as a campaign consultant relished taking on such state political powers as Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and former West Virginia Gov. Arch Moore, a Republican.
The comparison to the late Lee Atwater, former GOP national chairman, comes up a lot, from Democrats and Republicans who know King.
“King was in the same kind of mold,” said Holt, in terms of his masterly skill, his “zeal to the cause” and his talent for “picking up your opponent’s weaknesses and exploiting them.”
R. Lane Bailey, chief of staff for Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said King was known as tough, aggressive and sometimes mean. “In that Lee Atwater was sometimes unfair and unrelenting, I would agree” with the comparison, he said.
During one campaign, King said, he collected more than 19,000 copies of an opponent’s direct-mail solicitation and mailed back the enclosed envelopes with blank pieces of paper, because the rival had to pay 39 cents in postage for every one returned. During another, he started rumors that the opponent was gay and remembers feeling satisfied when he heard the candidate’s children had gotten into playground brawls as a result.
King’s experiences in regimented shelter life were quite different. There he stayed in a small, doorless cubicle with several other men, sleeping on an Army cot, eating when he was given food, waking up when he was told to wake up and going to sleep when he was told to go to sleep.
Staying at the Alexandria City Shelter in January, he said, he roomed with three men, all of whom had served time in prison for violent crimes. Night after night, he said, they talked about drugs and robberies and prison, while he tried to stay out of the conversations. King said one who had been convicted of slitting a woman’s throat discussed techniques for using a straight razor.
